


Lost/Found

by Nemainofthewater



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universes, Dark fluff, Death, Don't copy to another site, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Loneliness, Other characters are present, Spoilers though to episode 145, all of them - Freeform, building relationships, is dark fluff a tag? I feel it should be, pretty self indulgent, the fears - Freeform, though I never said anything about what kind of relationships..., warning for canon typical issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 11:49:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19973581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemainofthewater/pseuds/Nemainofthewater
Summary: I am lost/I am foundA series of AUs starring Jonathan Sims and the Entities.





	Lost/Found

**Author's Note:**

> This is incredibly self-indulgent. And I have no idea if it makes sense? This was meant as a procrastination fic and it became long oops.  
> I wanted to get this finished before the next episode, and I just made it!

The Stranger

_I am alone._

“Order for Jim!”

He sighs and gets up from the table, where he has been waiting for the past ten minutes, poking at his phone in increasing irritation as he tries to change his ringtone from whatever monstrosity Nikola has chosen for him this week.

“That’s me,” he says, standing at the counter with his buzzer, “Tuna melt, no chips.”

He has been ordering the same meal at the same restaurant, once a week for the past three years. They still don’t remember him.

“Here you go, mate,” the boy on the counter says. His name badge says ‘Hi! Call me Kevin J’. Kevin’s eyes narrow. “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asks slowly, painfully as if the words are being dragged out of him.

“No,” he sighs, “Just one of those faces I suppose.”

The Spiral 

_I am alone._

Jon lasts a year and three months. Quite the feat, as Gertrude is careful to inform him before the ritual. His predecessor had lasted less than half that time, and his death had been pointless.

Jon on the other hand… Jon’s stopping an apocalypse.

Wandering his corridors After, mind and body shattered into spiralling fractals whose sharp edges hurt with every step (hurt and feel right more and more right)…

That’s not any comfort to him.

The Corruption

_I am alone._

He spends his time in a nursing home. The nurses all love him: clad in his soft, green jumper and with a pair of glasses perched on his nose, he looks harmless. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, he brings in stacks and stacks of books, piled high in his arms until he can barely see over the top of them.

He visits every resident in turn, sitting gently by their bedside and reading to them. His voice is soft, gentle, mesmerising. The nurses say that he’s the only thing that can calm some of their more distressed patients. They ask him what his secret is.

Jon just smiles.

At the end of each and every one of his sessions with his flock, he’ll close the book and rest a proprietary hand on top of theirs. Give it a gentle squeeze. Feel the corruption spreading throughout their bodies, the endless cycle of mutation-death-mutation-corruption.

(When it feels his touch it speeds up, the corruption spreading faster and faster and deeper and deeper, sinking into bones and flesh and brain).

It’s not much. But it’s enough to feed his god.

The Slaughter

_I am alone._

Jon hears about Grifter’s Bone during his first year at Oxford. He thinks they’re a myth of course, there’s no real evidence that any such band existed. It’s something to debate down at the pub after lectures though, whenever Georgie drags him out from the library.

He forgets about them after a while. After he and Georgie just…fall apart. And then he determinedly spends the next four months avoiding her. Unable to look her in the eye because that’s another good thing that he’s ruined. There are no more late nights down at the pub, no hours of learning how to edit podcasts with Georgie’s friends, no more surprise lunches in the library. There’s only him and his books.

He gets the email at 3am, the after exams when everyone else is celebrating. He can hear the noise from outside his window, but he doesn’t want to join in. He wouldn’t know how to. The email has been sent straight to his student account, the sender’s address a garbled mixture of numbers and letters and symbols which-squinting at the screen-Jon thinks might be in Sumerian. Not that he really knows what Sumerian looks like.

It’s a short message.

_Port Mahon. Tomorrow. 11pm_

Nothing else.

It’s probably spam mail. It’s definitely fake. But something inside him…it needs to know.

What can it hurt?

The Vast

_I am alone._

They probably think it’s funny. That’s the worst of it. Nothing more than a joke.

Jon peers over the edge of the Ferris wheel and then jerks back, squeezing his eyes tightly shut.

He should have known. As soon as Robby Carter had offered to go on the Ferris Wheel with him, he should have known that it was a trick. Why else would anyone want to spend time with little Johnny Sims, newly orphaned, head permanently stuck in a book?

Still, he thinks, resolutely not paying attention to the way that his compartment swings and shudders in the brisk autumn breeze, someone had to notice soon. Anyone.

Please.

The Buried 

_I am alone._

His grandmother dies when he’s nineteen. It’s not a surprise. She’s been ill for a while. Longer than a while, years and years. For as long as he can remember if he’s honest.

He drops out of uni.

He can’t-there’s no way to pay for his degree and still earn enough money to pay for the funeral costs, for the nursing home: as nice a one as he could find. He needs a job. As soon as possible.

The house is the first to go. Too expensive: he doesn’t know why his grandmother didn’t sell it when she moved out. The memories, perhaps. That house was the only ting left of his parents.

The only jobs he can find are menial, badly-paying things that leave him exhausted and shaking at the end of fifteen, eighteen, twenty-hour shifts. Anything to let him earn a little more, earn enough to start paying off the endless debts.

But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

The interest mounts, the numbers rising inexorably until he can’t even think about the bank statements without panicking. Can’t think about the number increasing and increasing and increasing and increasing… It leaves him gasping for breath, crushing and squeezing him until he can’t breathe, until he can’t think of anything but the b-numbers. Until he dreams of them.

When he wakes one day to find that he has literally sunk into the floor, it’s almost a relief.

The Lonely

_I am alone._

It’s easy to just-disappear.

Nobody really cares about him. The scrawny kid from Bournemouth. He went to Oxford, you know, thinks he’s better than us.

Jon keeps his head down. Researches. And just…fades into the background.

It takes him three days to notice that nobody can see him anymore.

The Desolation

_I am alone._

Funnily enough, growing up in a cult dedicated to your existence as the grand messiah/avatar of destruction isn’t very conducive to a normal childhood. Nor does it lend itself to many playdates. Or socialisation of any kind that doesn’t involve a lot of metaphors and Jon having t be careful about what he says in case one of the more zealous members interprets it as a blessing to go and burn down another building. Not that it takes a lot.

He knows that there was talk of sending him to a children’s home when he was younger. But carefully holding himself in, making sure that he doesn’t accidentally brush against anyone in the street, not even a for a second, haunted by the smell of burning flesh…Perhaps it was for the best.

The Hunt 

_I am alone._

Vampires. Werewolves. The occasional human. Jon takes care of them all.

He doesn’t enjoy doing it. He doesn’t feel that it’s his righteous calling, or anything as vainglorious as that. He has no special destiny. He’s definitely not the Chosen one.

But he has a job. He sees the monsters in the everyday, in the people around him. And he hunts them. And he kills them.

The Web

_I am alone._

Mr Spider wants another guest for dinner. It’s polite to knock.

The Dark 

_I am alone._

Jon can’t open his eyes. Because if he does then it’ll get him. The monster that hides in his cupboard.

All he can do is lie in his bed, night after night, blanket pulled completely over his head…and hope that tonight isn’t the night that the monster decides that it’s hungry.

The Flesh 

_I am alone._

Nobody understands it. He doesn’t blame them: how can he explain the crippling need to know, to investigate, to find out exactly what the victims feel as their organs are slowly removed, one by one by one?

He’s not stupid. He doesn’t want to be put on some sort of government watchlist, or be diagnosed as a psychopath or sociopath or whatever label they decide fits him.

It isn’t about the pain: he just wants to know. Is that so wrong?

The End

_I am alone._

His parents die when he’s seven.

A car crash, they tell him. An accident. It was quick. They wouldn’t have felt anything.

Lying in his strange, new bed in his new, uncaring room he can’t help but go over and over what little he has been told about their deaths.

In the dark of his room, he plays and replays the accident over and over. Who died first? Would the airbag cushion them? Or would it be suffocating, his mum gasping for breath, trapped in the wreckage for hours and hours… He relives their deaths, turning their final moments over and over in his head…

He lies in bed. And he dies over and over. 

The Beholding

_I am alone._

After Georgie leaves, Jon just. Sits. Tries not to Know. Fights the knowledge that Georgie has found Melanie’s office and that the two of them have grabbed her bag and are making their way to the tube. He doesn’t want to know that they are talking, quietly. Georgie is trying to keep things light, telling her about the Admiral and the mouse that he managed to find and release into her flat. Melanie is grateful to have something else to think about and her steps quicken, caught between the relief of leaving the Institute where she feels the Eye on her at all times, crushed under its weight and the fear of leaving, picking at half-healed wounds over and over until she finally manages to heal them.

There’s one moment, as she’s stepping out of the Institute doors where she looks at Georgie, really looks for a moment and a wave of fondness and love and thankfulness rises in her…

And Jon recoils so quickly that he gives himself a headache.

He still can’t stop Knowing.

( **The Extinction**

Isn’t it better? For everything to end? The world’s always ending somewhere.)

The Beholding

_I am found_

‘Mrrrow,’ says the basket on his desk.

“What?”

Jon approaches it carefully. He hasn’t Seen that anything dangerous had entered the Institute (lately) but honestly, with his luck that doesn’t mean a anything.

There’s a note stuck to the cage, written in Georgie’s precise handwriting, the one she uses when she wants it to be legible, not the unrestrained scrawl that Jon is used to seeing.

_He’s been fed. I’ll be back at 2._

That’s all the note says.

Jon opens the basket and the Admiral jumps out, fur faintly ruffled. He sniffs, looks around Jon’s office with a gimlet stare, and then settles himself down onto his pile of Statements To Be Read and starts to calmly lick himself, putting his coat back into order.

Jon blinks. Closes the door behind him (he doesn’t want to think about what the Admiral would do if he were left alone in the Archives). And sits in his chair.

Hesitantly, he raises a hand to stroke the Admiral’s fur, shuddering slightly when he makes contact with his small, warm body. How long has it been since he touched someone without the expectation of pain? As if sensing his thoughts, the Admiral looks up at him. And, without warning and forcing Jon to move his chair back slightly so that there’s enough room, he jumps onto Jon’s lap.

Oh.

In the end he spends an hour just sitting there, carding his hands through the Admiral’s soft fur and listening to him purr in delight.

The End

_I am found_

Jonathan Sims grows up strange. Not that it’s a surprise, poor dear, people are quick to reassure him, with so much tragedy so early on in life. No, he’s a perfectly polite young man, if a tad withdrawn.

But people don’t stick around. He makes them uncomfortable. There’s something cold and creeping in his calm eyes, something that makes them think of dark, cold tombs, and the smell of formaldehyde.

Jon quickly learns that people are scared of him. Even the grown-ups. Especially the grown-ups.

He learns not to care.

And maybe he pulls away himself. Because…there’s nothing that can be proven of course, but anyone he gets close to tend to have tragic accidents of their own. Or receive bad news about distant relatives. Or not so distant relatives.

And of course it’s nothing to do with Jon, nothing at all, but. Well. Better safe than sorry.

Jon is used to people looking at him with fear in their eyes.

Until he meets Georgie.

And. Oh. Staring into her fearless eyes, he feels something slot into place.

The Flesh

_I am found_

In the end he goes to a therapist. Dr Lector is incredibly understanding, even with Jon awkwardly talking around the subject. Honestly, after a few careful probes, by three sessions in he feels entirely comfortable letting the doctor know some of his more…private thoughts. Less fit for human consumption.

Not all of them of course. He still keeps some things close to his chest.

But talking about it helps, relieves some of the ache in his chest, makes him feel more connected to the world. Maybe all he needed was someone to listen?

When Dr Lector invites him over for a homecooked dinner, he accepts.

The Dark

_I am found_

He finds the group online. Honestly, he’s inclined to dismiss it as ludicrous. A gathering of lunatics.

Apart from there’s art. A simple sketch, more of an outline than anything else. It’s unmistakeable though. The moment he sees it, Jon recognises the monster that haunted his childhood, tormenting him every night until one day… one day it stopped coming. To him in any case.

The coroner said his parents died of a heart attack. But he knows better.

So he goes to the first meeting. It’s a support group for people affected by It. The monster from the cupboard.

As he initially thought, the group is composed primarily of conspiracy theorists, goths, and university students looking for a laugh. Jon almost leaves in the first ten minutes. But…then Manuela speaks. And all he can think of, listening to her low, fervent voice, is that there is someone who understands. Someone who knows.

She comes and finds him after the meeting.

“I can see our Master’s mark on you,” is all that she says to him. She hands him a card, one that he accepts more out of bemusement and innate politeness than anything else.

He glances down at it: ‘The People’s Church of the Divine Host’ it reads. There’s a symbol of a closed eye embossed on it. And a handwritten date, time, and location.

When he looks up again, Manuela is gone.

Well. What’s the harm in going to one more meeting? 

The Web

_I am found_

Jon hums contently. He can feel his spiders under his skin, contently spinning their webs.

He’s never alone anymore.

Never.

The Hunt

_I am found_

His superiors tend to turn a blind eye to his extracurricular activities so long as he maintains plausible deniability and so long as he doesn’t get caught. They don’t ask and he doesn’t tell, to borrow a phrase from across the pond.

It takes him a while to notice them.

Until one day his prey is literally shot out from under him.

The vampire collapses to the ground, a neat bullet hole decorating its head, and he looks up. And into the eyes of the newly sectioned constable.

They look at each other. And they recognise each other. Like calls to like.

The Desolation

_I am found_

He sees him in a coffee shop, staring at him over a mug of tea.

Every day he sits at the same table and stares at Jon. Until one day he comes over.

“Hi,” the boy says, and they’re all so young to Jon no matter that physically they look the same age, “I. Erm. My name’s Martin. And I was wondering if you’d like to er. Go and get coffee with me some time?”

His voice rises at the end of his sentence, and his face gets redder and redder with every passing word. He looks young and innocent and oh so breakable. Human.

It’s therefore a surprise when Jon hears his own voice replying: “Why not?”

The Lonely

_I am found_

A hand reaches out and grabs him by the shoulder.

“What?” Jon says, stupidly. He’s not used to being touched. Even before he vanished from the world, he wasn’t used to being touched.

“Evan?” says the woman next to the man whose hand is still clasping Jon’s shoulder.

“Just a moment,” the man, Evan?, says absently, studying Jon’s face. And Jon feels seen. For the first time in…well, in a while.

“How..?” he asks helplessly, not sure what he’s asking.

“Hmm,” Evan says, then turns to him companion: “Naomi,” he says, “I’m so sorry. I forgot that I agreed to meet-” he glances at Jon who takes a moment before he realises what Evan wants.

“Jon,” he says quickly.

“Meet with Jon,” Evan continues, smooth and soothing, “It was all very last minute, you know how it is. I’ll make it up to you.”

Naomi sighs. “You and your strays, Evan,” she says, but she sounds fond. She gives him a quick peck on his cheek: “I’ve got an overdue load of laundry calling my name anyway,” she says lightly, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Of course. 8:30?Prêt. I’ll buy you breakfast?”

“You’d better.”

Jon watches her walk off, dazed. She had seen him as well. They had both seen him. He raises a hand to his shoulder unconsciously: Evan’s hand is still there it’s warm. Blushing, he drops his hand as soon as he sees Evan staring at him. The other man doesn’t look annoyed though. Nor does he remove his hand.

The Buried

_I am found_

He doesn’t know how long he’s been down here. Surrounded by the unrelenting pressure of the earth, embracing and surrounding him, the dirt filling his lungs and constricting his ribs. Dirt in his eyes and ears and mouth. Mud oozing through his veins and pumping through his heart and transforming his bones.

One day (hourmonthyearseconddecade) he feels someone enter. This isn’t strange: people come. No one leaves.

But…this is different. She doesn’t feel like the others. They’re all like him: beaten down and buried, metaphorically or literally.

She’s fighting, screaming obscenities, trying to escape, struggling until the sticky mud coating her limbs hardens and dries and forces her to curl smaller and smaller and smaller until she’s just as trapped as the rest of them.

That still wouldn’t have changed much.

Apart from the fact that she ends up trapped next to him.

Slowly, slowly as the movement of the continents, her hand creeps forward, inch by stubborn inch. And…she takes his hand. Nothing else. They’re still trapped. But it’s something. 

The Vast

_I am found_

“Hey kid. You ok up there?”

Jon opens his eyes cautiously. He’s shivering in the cold, had started an hour in and not been able to stop, his thin school blazer not doing much to stop the bite of the wind. It’s a grown-up talking to him. Jon can’t see much from so high up, only a blurry figure, and maybe the suggestion of something on his face. Something deep red painting a branching pattern on their skin.

“No!” he calls down, too tired and scared to notice that the man he’s talking to is the only person in what was once a bustling fairground, “I can’t get down. I’m trapped!”

“Hmm,” the man says, and it doesn’t occur to Jon to wonder how he can hear him from so far away and through the whistling wind, “That does look like a problem.”

The man’s voice doesn’t sound concerned, or even that curious. There’s just a faint boredom to it. 

“I suppose you’ll have to jump then,” the man continues.

“What?”

Embarrassingly, Jon’s voice breaks mid word. He doesn’t notice though. Because now he can’t help but look over the side of the compartment, look at the ground so far below him. Feel every small movement of the wind. It’s like he’s been suspended mid-air, and if he moves, even thinks about moving then he’ll fall. And now this stranger wants him to jump? How? Why?

“You either jump or you die up there,” the man says, “No skin off my back either way.”

“No,” Jon says, voice soft and scared,” No, they’ll come. They wouldn’t leave me here.”

The man does say anything. He doesn’t need to. Because however long he’s been stranded here, nobody has noticed. Nobody except the stranger.

Jon takes a deep breath. Tries to ignore the terror rising in him. Carefully, slowly, he raises the metal bar keeping him trapped against his seat. Immediately vertigo rises in him. He whimpers, but he continues. He has to.

“You’ll catch me?” he asks.

The man snorts.

“Of course not,” he says, “Why would I do that?”

Immediately Jon draws back, fiercely missing the protection of the metal restraint.

“But-” the man continues, “If you’re really lucky, kid, you won’t need to be caught. Because you’ll have something better. You’ll jump and you’ll fall, and the sky will swallow you. And if you’re really lucky? It’ll spit you back out again.”

That…doesn’t sound pleasant. But it sounds better than dying up here, left behind and forgotten. So, he climbs to the side of the compartment. And-before he can think better of it-he jumps.

The Slaughter

_I am found_

Jon screams into the microphone in front of him, ears ringing despite their protection, hands sore from snapped guitar strings.

He finishes and stands, panting on stage. The silence is strange. It always is after their set has finished. Unnatural.

Rolling his shoulders back, he groans in relief. Sets always take it out of him, no matter how many they do. Still, looking around at the carnage, it looks like they’ve had a good audience. A…receptive audience.

Raisin a hand to his ears, Jon grimaces. He needs to change his earplugs again. These ones are blood soaked. Already. Still, he thinks, turning to Alfie and exchanging a triumphant high five before being engulfed in the rest of the band’s enthusiastic celebrations, there are worse things.

He can’t wait for the next gig.

The Corruption

_I am found_

One day he arrives and there’s someone else sitting at one of the bedsides, reading…urgh reading Keats.

“Excuse me,” he says, politely although the man jumps at his approach anyway, “I don’t believe we’ve met?”

“Oh! I er. You must be Jon! Mr Sims. Jon. Erm. Ms Pryde said that you’d be here today. I’m Martin Blackwood. Er.”

“Mrs Blackwood’s son,” Jon says, cutting him off before the introduction can go on any longer. He feels-irrationally annoyed. Someone coming in and talking to one of His. He can see the redness around Martin’s eyes, the telling silence, the way that Mrs Blackwood has turned away from them both to stare at her wall. Martin shouldn’t have come.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Jon says, masking his annoyance with a mask of neutral politeness.

“No! I mean. You could stay?”

Jon pauses a moment. There’s something desperately hopeful in Martin’s eyes. Jon slowly sits down.

“Fine,” he says, “But I’m not reading-” he casts a scornful at Martin’s discarded book, “ _That_.”

The Spiral 

_I am found_

The new Archival staff are funny. Sasha doesn’t scream when she meets him, but he can tell that she wants to, and her terror sends warm tingles down what’s left of his body.

(Her blood is warm. He hasn’t felt anything warm for days and months and weeks and years and never and always)

It’s funny, watching them scramble around like ants, unaware of the world they live in. Silly Gertrude, not leaving them with any information. He isn’t impressed with the Archivist, his gentle eyes and soft curls unsuitable for his new position in life. He doesn’t know how Gertrude managed to find him.

He traps Tim and Martin in his tunnels for a few days just to watch them run. He’s always planning on giving them back…but the sound of their bickering, laced with terror and a faint protectiveness that makes him draw back in bewilderment.

They’re too interesting to lose.

Jon is neutral but he’s also free. So he traps the Not!Them in a corridor. And just…watches them. The Archivist and his sacrifices-to-be. Eventually, Sasha starts leaving him tea (to the loud protests of Tim). He can’t drink it (doesn’t like the memories that come with it) won’t drink it, but he does leave the mugs deposited neatly in the draining board, porcelain exterior cracked in dizzying spirals.

On day there’s a new mug waiting for him. Picking it up, he stares at it. There’s a picture of a small black and white kitten on it, eyes covered by a pair of novelty glasses, covered in swirls.

“Oh,” Jon says.

The Stranger

_I am found_

He likes being Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Likes the way that Martin will bring him tea and a sandwich at lunch, often stopping in and chatting with him while he carefully unpeels it and eats it.

He likes the way that Tim will come in each morning, slap him on the back and offer to take him out kayaking at the weekend. He never accepts, but he thinks he might soon. Maybe next week. Tim can sense him thawing as well: yesterday he left a couple of brochures out on his desk that Jon actually leafed through before realising what he was doing and guiltily dropping them in a desk drawer.

Sasha…Sasha has been staring at him. He can feel it, her eyes boring into him when she thinks he isn’t looking. But she’s been looking at everyone that way recently, and she always sweeps him along whenever they go out to the pub after work.

Even with the feel of the Eye upon him, the small condescending smiles that Elias gives him whenever they pass each other that say ‘I know who you are’… Even the knowledge that he is a gift of truce to the Eye doesn’t diminish the fact that for the first time he feels…Loved.

And as the days until the Unknowing tick down the terror is building in him.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on Tumblr as [Nemainofthewater ](https://nemainofthewater.tumblr.com)


End file.
